Oil, grease and solid waste contaminant removal or recovery systems are well known in the prior art. Over the past thirty years there has been a steady move towards requiring food handling facilities to have systems for servicing kitchen grease and solid waste bearing water flows. Sewer system lines can become clogged from the fats, oil and grease waste materials (hereinafter referred to as “F.O.G.”) put into the sewer system from food handling facilities. This has led more and more sewer authorities to implement fats, oils and grease control programs. These programs regulate food handling facilities and the manner in which they process F.O.G.s. The object of many of these programs is to ensure that food handling facilities remove as much of the F.O.G. as possible from the effluent flow, thereby releasing only grey water to the sewer system.
Active separators remove F.O.G. from the effluent, typically by some skimming operation. Skimming when skimming is required and not skimming when it is not required is an issue that has not yet been precisely addressed by the art. The traditional methodology is simply to use a timer that turns on the skimming apparatus at a certain time of day and runs it for a certain period, providing the user only with control as to the time of day and duration. For installations that have very regular schedules, this may be sufficient. However, for other installations that operate on less than a regular schedule, problems can arise. Schedule variations can be as simple as the differences between weekday and weekend operation. Also, for installations such as school cafeterias that do not operate during the summer, F.O.G. will not be added to the effluent during the summer, so there is not a reason to run the separator during the summer. Nonetheless, if the separator works on a daily schedule according to its timer, it will run even if there is no F.O.G. to be removed.
One of the downsides of this operation, besides the wasted energy of skimmer operation, is that when all of the F.O.G. is removed, the water becomes exposed. There may be food solids remaining in the water that are decomposing and off-gassing foul odors. If a F.O.G. mat is allowed to remain on the water, the odor is contained within the water. Also, humidity emanating from the water can rise into the electronics and provide a challenge to the longevity of the electronics.